Science Friday - Climate Politics, Football and Math, Ether. May 31, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

A green wave is sweeping through Washington, and it’s picking up Republicans who are eager to share their ideas on clean energy and climate change. But even as Republican lawmakers turn to shaping climate policy, the White House is doubling down on climate denial, forming a “climate review panel” to vet and discredit the already peer-reviewed science on climate change. So where will climate science end up? Ira’s joined by marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and climate scientist Michael Mann for a round table conversation about climate politics, policy, and science activism. Growing up, John Urschel grew up playing both math puzzles and high school football, and he would follow both of those passions. After playing for the Baltimore Ravens, he is now currently a mathematics Ph.D. candidate at MIT. He joins Ira to discuss seeing the world from a mathematical perspective and how he was able to balance the challenges of math and football. Albert Michelson was a Polish immigrant who grew up in the hard-scrabble atmosphere of the California gold rush. In his physics career, Michelson also measured the speed of light to an unprecedented degree of accuracy, and designed one of the most elegant physics experiments in the 19th century, to detect something that ultimately didn’t even exist: the “luminiferous ether.” Science historian David Kaiser tells the story of how that idea rose and fell in this interview with Ira and Science Friday’s Annie Minoff.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll talk to John Urchall who went from pro footballer to MIT Math Ph.D. student. We'll talk about his passion for math. But first, a green wave is sweeping through Washington, and it's picking up lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who are eager to share their ideas on clean energy and climate change. We know the climate's changing and the global industrial activity has played a role in this phenomenon. So I proposed a new Manhattan project for clean energy, to clean up our air, to raise family incomes, and to deal with climate change. Our military does not have the luxury of an academic debate about climate change.

They must respond to the reality that we face today, and so should the United States Congress. Think those are all Democrats? You'd be wrong. All three of them, Republicans. That were as Oklahoma Representative Frank Lucas, followed by Tennessee Senator. Lamar Alexander, and finally, Florida Representative Matt Gates, all Republicans, all talking about climate change. But even as Republican lawmakers present their ideas and get involved in climate policy, the White House is doubling down on climate denial, forming a climate review panel, as they call it, to vet and discredit the already peer-reviewed science on climate change. The panel's leader is William Happer, a physicist who has said that carbon dioxide

has been unfairly demonized, comparing it to the Holocaust, quote, the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Some comparison. Happer declined an invitation to join us today, but here with me now are Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and founder and CEO of the consulting firm Ocean Collective. She's also founder of the nonprofit Urban Ocean Lab, thing tank for coastal cities. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you, Dr. Johnson. Climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann, is the author of the Madhouse Effect and a distinguished professor at Penn State. He's also director of the Earth Systems Science Center there. Welcome back, Dr. Mann. Thanks, Ira. Great to be with you both. Nice to have you back.

Dr. Johnson, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey, James Riley, has ordered that scientists at that agency not use climate models that pre-executive. Project beyond the year 2040. Unpacked that for us. Why do we need to go any further than 2040? Turns out many humans will be alive past 2040, and the climate will continue to change. And so not using these really robust scientific models to understand how we should plan for our safety and security is really just foolish.

For example, sea level rise is projected to increase by three years. to nine feet over the next few decades. And so if we stop in 2040 and we start building more infrastructure and houses along the coast in flood zones, that would be ridiculous to ignore that science and proceed willy-nilly. Dr. Man, is there something special about that date at 2040 that the president's advisors know about? Well, I mean, it's only, you know, two decades out. It's very close at this point. And I would use the analogy. It's sort of like being told that you have to plan out your entire retirement based on the amount of money in your 401k after working for three years? Well, that's not the way it works. It's cumulative, right? The savings,

the money that you build up is cumulative over the course of your career. And the same thing is true with carbon emissions. The more carbon we burn, the more damage we do. And conversely, the less carbon we burn, the less damage we do. And so by keeping this, the time frame that scientists are allowed to use to assess climate change impacts to only the next two decades. What they're doing is hiding the true impacts of continuing to burn fossil fuels and generate carbon pollution. They're cumulative in nature. And as Iana pointed out, there are certain key tipping points.

When we melt enough of the ice, the major ice sheets, we lock in potentially tens of feet of sea level rise. And that may not play out for decades to come. but we lock it in if we don't stop burning carbon in the near term. What is the role of this climate panel, Michael, that the White House is assembling? Hasn't the science already been peer-reviewed? What do they want to do with the science here? Yeah, I mean, there's as a robust consensus now among the world's scientists about climate change as there is about the theory of gravity.

Scientists aren't debating the basic facts. Climate change is real. It's caused by human activity, fossil fuel burning. It's already doing great damage. And what we have is sort of a rearguard effort by a small contingent within the Trump administration. This is mostly coming from the EPA. And the EPA transition team was run by a number of affiliates of the Koch brothers and fossil fuel interests. And what they've tried to do is to prevent the administration from moving in the direction of doing something about climate change.

But as you already alluded to, the problem is there's this sort of perfect storm right now. that is moving us in the direction of action. The fact that people can see with their own two eyes, the impacts of climate change have become so obvious that you can't deny it anymore. There is this international youth movement that's raised awareness and concern about climate action. And finally, this sort of, yeah, no, absolutely. And then in our politics with, you know, AOC and the prospect of a green New Deal, that's forcing Republicans to the table because they're going to get a heavy-handed regulatory. government solution to this problem if they don't come to the table with their own solutions. And some of them, I think, have made that decision.

Dr. Johnson, you've written about how scientists at the National Park Service and the EPA have been asked to remove the words climate change from their reports. Other government sciences have been blocked from going to conferences. Many crucial scientific jobs remain unfilled. Is there a single issue that you find most troubling here? What I find most troubling is the disregard of science. as the basis for decision-making. I mean, we have this elegant scientific method

where we can learn things and collect data and test hypotheses and the thought that that wouldn't be used to undergird decisions about how to protect the American people. I mean, the science is being done with taxpayer dollars. So the fact that we've had 90 major attacks on science under the Trump administration as cataloged by the Union of Concerned Scientists, as you mentioned, this censorship or halting or editing studies or politicizing how scientific.

funding is distributed, and 43 top science positions remain unfilled in the government. So we're just completely missing an opportunity to make good decisions that are based on facts. And Michael Florida, Representative Matt Gates, has pitched an alternative to the Green New Deal called the Green Real Deal. Why are Republicans like him breaking the ranks and saying, we need to act on climate change? Yeah, you know, it's pretty remarkable because Gates is, you know, a true, you know, conservative, a Republican. He is one of Donald Trump's most ardent and consistent supporters. And yet he is in a state, which is literally on the front lines of dealing with the impacts of climate change, sea level rise, ever more devastating hurricanes.

They don't have time to deny the science because they're dealing with it firsthand. And he made a remarkable comment recently that, you know, history will judge us on. this issue. Did we act on the greatest threat that human civilization faces? Did we choose to act or did we choose to deny? He wants to be on the right side of history. He wants his party to be on the right side of history. And, you know, I think that there is a growing movement among Republicans who don't want to be seen as having been on the wrong side of history when it comes to the greatest challenge we have faced as a civilization. One of those quotes you played at the beginning about military readiness being an issue, I'm hoping.

hoping is one of these bridge topics, right? So Navy bases on the coast, they can't just ignore the fact that sea level is rising. It's a national security issue. So this administration just refusing to deal with the fact that things are changing is putting us all at risk. And as people, the politicians speak at, and let me just do an open invitation to the Republican Congresspeople that we've talked to and we've actually phoned their offices and we're asking them to come on and talk. I hope they will agree with us. Should scientists like Michael and you, should they begin to speak out more about the issue?

Well, clearly we are. And I think government scientists need to be afforded the opportunity to talk about their research. So there is something called the Scientific Integrity Act that was introduced by Senator Brian Chats and Representative Paul Tonko. It's with the House Science Committee, which is led by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. and we really need to pass that because that's the opportunity to protect federal scientists to enable them to talk about the research and prevent them from being censored. And we deserve to know what science our government is supporting and how that information can and should be used. Michael, two years ago, well, now three years ago, almost hardly a word was spoken about climate change in the presidential elections and the debates. You think it looks like there's been a huge seat change, if I might put it that one.

way. Do you read that also? I do, and as I alluded to before, there is this sort of perfect storm of circumstances that have come together. The international youth movement on climate is just because these kids speak with, you know, a true moral authority, and I think is very difficult for any but the most jaded of adults to not recognize that this is about our children, grandchildren, and their legacy, and the fact that the impacts of climate change are no longer theoretical. We're seeing them play out in real time on our television screens and our newspaper headlines. And so it's now, as I understand it, it's the top issue right now among Democrats in the Democratic primary.

And that's never been true for either party before. Obviously, it's a lower priority issue in the Republican Party. But at least for one of the two major parties, this is now the principal issue. It's the issue of our time. The youth climate strike movement is actually having a. a petition for a climate debate. So I really hope that happens so we can get a really nuanced understanding of where these presidential candidates stand. Do you think the candidates should be asked now about what their positions are? Yeah, the sooner the better. And as part of any

debates that come up at this point? For sure. I mean, we didn't in the... The first debates are coming up soon. Yeah, the last presidential debate cycle, we didn't have a single question on climate change. and there's no way you can get away with that this time around. Michael, you'll be watching that. I don't think we'll see it. I think we will see climate as a major issue in the democratic debates. And it's interesting because the young people, as you say. Yeah. The young people are leading the way.

That's interesting to see. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Ayanne Elizabeth Johnson, marine biologist and founder and CEO of Ocean Collective. She's also founder of the nonprofit Urban Ocean Lab. That's a think tank for coastal cities. And climate scientist Michael Mann, author of the Madhouse Effect and Distinguished Professor at Penn State University. He's also director of the Earth System Science Center there. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Ira. And if you've been following our own degree of change series on climate change, we're going to be back with a new chapter. Our next chapter will be on urban heat islands in just a few weeks. Get involved at ScienceFriiday.com slash degrees of change. Tell us what you see in your local communities about this topic. Heat Islands, that's Science Friday.com slash degrees of change. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. You know, there are some natural words, natural pairings. For example, when you say one, it makes you think of the other, like peanut butter and jelly, physics and black holes, math and football. No, that last one might not be one that pops up in your head. But for my next guest, math and football, were two of his past. And he says for him, they both gave him a different view of the world. John Urchall was recruited by the Baltimore Ravens in the fifth round of the NFL draft in 2014. He played as an offensive lineman, but he wanted to also follow his other passion,

higher-level math. So he quit football, and now he's a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. And now he can add an author to that list because his new book is Mind and Matter, a life and math and football. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you. You said in your book that every kid is a mathematician.

They find logic and reasoning and questioning their parents. What were your early math interests? Well, this is even before I can sort of remember having math memories, but my mother says that I was quite interested in shapes in particular. So sort of the first things I learned with respect to math were, you know, the different shapes, squares, rectangles, hexagons, octagon, circles, and trying to recognize those shapes like out in the world. Like if we were outside and I saw a square, I would point to it and I would say, you know, square. Or if I saw an octagon, I would point to it and I would say whatever I, you know, was calling an octagon. And so this is probably my earliest sort of planted memory of math, I would say.

Yeah, and your mom reading in the book was really key in motivating you to follow your math interest, was she not? Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I don't think, I should say she has a bias towards math in that, you know, when she was younger, she loved math, she loved science, she loved physics. but I don't think she pushed me towards math because she loved math. I think she really pushed me towards math because she saw that I had some talent in it. And really sort of my whole life, she's always been an enabler, always sort of enabling me to sort of do whatever I'm best at or whatever I enjoy or whatever I want to be. And that's something that I'm really thankful to my mother for.

You know, when you talk to scientists and mathematicians, they usually have a mentor who tutored them through. Could you consider your mother to be one of those kinds? Yes, I think, well, I've had, you know, multiple mentors through multiple parts of my life. But in my early life, yes, I mean, my mother, she would buy me math workbooks when I was a little kid, and I would just love doing them. She would buy me puzzle books. I would love like Martin Gardner puzzles, different types of puzzle books. We would, every Friday night, we would, like, order pizza, and we would play, like, a game night. So we would play games like Monopoly or different sort of quantitative type games where there is chance involved, but you have to make smart strategic decisions.

And she just did a number of things to sort of encourage me in math. And I would say she was definitely my first mentor. So you were learned how to do critical thinking, smart strategic decisions, which I guess from my life of watching pro football on TV, the people who succeed know how to do that on the ball field also. Yes, although I would say that it's a different type of decision making, I believe, depending on your position. 844-7-24-8255 is our number if you would like to talk to John Urchall, co-author of A Mind and Matter, a Life in Math and Football. In the book, there's a story about your dad who enrolled you in college classes when you were still in eighth grade?

I wouldn't say college classes. He set me up to audit one college course the summer after eighth grade. because, well, my mom had enrolled me in a sort of summer program that was sort of geared towards engineering, but it was quite hokey, and I didn't really enjoy it. And so my father agreed to do this for me. And I loved it so much. It was really a lot of fun. So you loved math from the early time on. What made you make the decision then to go into it as a career?

Yes. So I've always enjoyed quantitative reasoning. I've always enjoyed puzzles. I've enjoyed critical thinking. I didn't actually know what a mathematician was until I was in college, I have to say. Like I didn't know that the career mathematician existed. I didn't know what mathematicians did. I didn't know who employed them. I didn't know what they looked like. And so it wasn't until I was at Penn State. And I was actually even majoring in math at the time, but planning to use it for some other field. And I was taking this course, and a math professor really took an interest in me. And he saw I was a strong student. And he told me to come visit his office, and he gave me a book to read. And he introduced me to mathematical research, and he actually showed me what a mathematician was. And once I started doing math research and once I started interacting with this person, I knew I wanted to be a mathematician. but prior to meeting this person, I didn't even really know that this was a career that existed.

So what, you gave up your football career at age, what, 26? Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, I'm bad with sort of what age I was when I did certain things. Did the threat of concussions and head injury have anything to do with saying, you know, I'm going to go into math? It makes sense now. Well, it's something you definitely need to think about when you're making. decisions like that. I mean, there's a lot that goes into those decisions, but of course, that's something you should think about. If that's not something you think about, then you're not

doing a good analysis. But also, there should be other things you consider. Yeah, like you like the subject. Yeah, do you like the subject? How important is football to you? Like, how important is longevity, you know, things like this. Small details. And you'll make so much more money as a math professor than you will as a football player too, I'm sure, to your calculus. Oh, I got all of those in there. Let's go to Diana in Houston, Texas. Hi there. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. Go ahead. I just wanted to ask, what are your favorite fields in math? I just graduated with my bachelor's degree in math, and I just wanted to see which fields you particularly enjoy.

Oh, thank you for calling in. So I have to say that when I started, doing math, I really enjoyed, I really, really enjoyed probability theory, and I really loved my first stochastic calculus course. Although I don't work in that area, I would say that this is an area that really sort of, I was really struck by sort of the beauty of like the non-zero quadratic variation, and it was just something very sort of very enjoyable for me. So that I quite enjoyed and now I have to say I really do love sort of the field of the theory of computation and computational complexity. Again, a field I don't work in, but mainly because when you look at all of the proof techniques

and all of the breakthroughs and all of the papers, you don't really see like certain general techniques popping up again and again. Often you see these sort of like wild inventive ideas. And so I like the idea of a field where sort of you're always sort of testing yourself and trying very different and very new techniques. But I work in graph theory and numerical analysis and machine learning. You know, I remember my 10th grade math teacher, Mr. Cavallero teaching geometry in it, which I loved. And he said, you will love math because it's elegant. It's beautiful.

He was right. We were all, you know, he used to make fun of him because he would talk like. that and by the end of the semester we all did. First of all, that's fantastic to hear. You had a very good geometry teacher because I have to say, geometry in high school can go one of two ways. First of all, geometry in high school has so much potential because this is the first time you're introduced to the concept of a proof.

Right. The concept of truly knowing something. And it is beautiful when you see it played out, isn't it? Yes, if it's presented to you in a very nice way as opposed to sort of like, let's learn this fact, let's learn that fact. And now we need to take our piece of paper. We need to draw a line down the middle. And we need to do this and do that and do that. If you get too caught up in the trees of like 10th grade geometry, I think most people take it in 10th grade.

If you get caught up in the trees of that, you sort of miss out on sort of the very beautiful forest of the concept of sort of. being able to prove with certainty some very basic geometrical facts. Let me go to the phones. Sarah in Connecticut who wants to talk more about teachers. Hi, Sarah. Hi. I'm also a eighth-grade math teacher, and I'm familiar with the guest article in the New York Times

about teachers needing to be more like coaches with the football analogy. I'm also a coach, so I would love to know, like, what can I do as a math teacher to really? bring that element of fun and coaching to my students. Yes, that's a fantastic question. So, of course, I, you know, I always encourage making math class fun. The main sort of, the main thing that I was hoping would people would get out of this Sunday review piece that she's referring to is just the power of a little bit of motivation,

especially in the classroom. So the concept of being a math teacher and recognizing that you have certain strong students and really encouraging them to dream big, really sort of telling them about different careers that they could do in mathematics, introducing them to famous mathematicians sort of in our current era and the things that they've done, introduce them to sort of resources that they can use to try to sort of reach their goals of, let's say, being great mathematicians or great physicists, sort of in the same way that, you know, high school football coaches really, really push their good players to dream big and play college football and try to play professional

football. And I think it doesn't take much to sort of plant a seed in a young person to tell them, like, listen, you are good at this, you can aspire to be the next, you know, left tackle for Michigan. I mean, this is what my football coaches were telling me. Or you can aspire to be, you know, the next, let's say, math professor at Princeton or some such thing. Because we spend so little time in all the sciences, including math, in great school and high school, of exposing the beauty of. of the topics. I mean, we roll little trucks down inclined planes and physics,

but we don't talk about who the great physicists were or why they were that way. We don't bring personalities into any of these. We don't talk about why these things are important. We just present it, and you don't get to see the beauty that way or how they see it. No, it's certainly true, and I must say, so I don't know if that's the case in the way physics is generally taught. I know, so if you read the book, you'll know that my physics teacher had a profound impact on me when I was in high school, and I thought he was quite an amazing teacher. And he did sort of discuss a little bit about the people who discovered certain things, which I think

is important to tie a person to certain things. But I would say that I think tying people to a lot of the sort of things we teach or a lot of the sort of results in the sciences actually helps humanize it. And it helps you understand that the way that they're learning it in their classroom is not the simple, clean way that people just came up with it thousands of years ago. Hi, Myra Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You were trying to go down the engineering road but decided to focus on math. What What was the difference for you? Well, so I have to say that, first of all, before I tell my story about how I did not

become an engineer, I should say that being an engineer is a great profession, and there's nothing wrong with this. But for me, all my engineering classes were just really not interesting to me. They were so focused on this concept of how, this idea of here's a formula. Here's some fact from physics, from mathematics. And now, how are we going to use this to, you know, solve some engineering problem? Yeah. But, and how is a very important problem?

I mean, it's a very important question to answer. But I'm very much a why person. I see something, and I want to know, why is that true? Why does that work? That's what Richard Feynman talked about his whole life as a physicist. You talk about the state of math that there is a diversity problem when it comes to math. You don't see a lot of African Americans in math. What are your thoughts about this?

Yeah. So I don't know. I wouldn't say diversity problem. I don't know how to put it, but I would say that, first of all, African Americans are extremely, extremely underrepresented in mathematics. American women are also underrepresented, as are a number of our. other minorities, and I would say that it's really, it seems to me to be the result of something that really happens from the moment a young person is born until, you know, let's say high school, that sort of these statistics are really starting to be made before a student even steps foot

on a college campus. And I think it's really just sort of showing that, you know, in this country, It still very, very much matters the household you're born into. The socioeconomic circumstances that you're born into, it really affects the quality of education you get. Not only that, but it has a strong effect on the social culture that you're around and whether or not they value education and or to what degree. And I find that these sort of factors have led the amount. mathematics community to sort of have a sort of skewed representation. Quickly, before we go, are you hopeful it's getting better, signs that it's getting better? That's a great question. I am sort of a constant optimist in many ways, and I really do hope that,

first of all, that time will just make this better, that things are better now, children being born now, have it better than children being born 20 years ago, and so 20, 30 years from now, we'll see sort of the benefits of that, but I also believe that there's not, we sort of, we need to work towards educational equity in the United States, and I don't think, I don't think we're very close to something that's acceptable. So much more to learn about John and read about him in his new book, Mind and Matter, a life and math and football, co-authored with Louisa Thomas. Thank you, John,

for what you're doing and for taking time to be with us today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. John Herschel, former offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, and you can read an excerpt of the book on our website at Science Friday.com slash football, mind and matter, a life in math and football.

We're going to take a break, and after, we're going to take a look back at an incredible scientific idea that unfortunately wasn't true. The luminiferous ether, and ingenious experiment designed to detect it. Remember that whole thing about the ether? Not talking about the thing that puts you to sleep, about the ether, different kind of ether.

Luminiferous ether. We'll talk about why and what happened with it after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato, and for the rest of the hour, we're going to be diving into the vaults of science history because the hosts of our podcast, Undiscovered, are working on a new series all about science history. And if you've read any of my books, you know how much I love science history. Co-host Annie MN Office here to tell us about it.

Hey, Annie. Let's tell us. Hey, Ira. Yeah. So like you, I and my co-host, El Fetter, are huge science history buffs. And recently, we started thinking about all the scientific theories and ideas that we used to think were true. Like over the course of history, these ideas were accepted science. And then all of a sudden they kind of weren't anymore. So spontaneous generation might be an example, phrenology, and those ideas, they're kind of punchlines today, but we thought, what if we take them seriously?

What if we ask, well, why did we think these things? What convinced us that they were true? And then how did we figure out that maybe we weren't? So that's what the series is all about. And today I thought we'd kick off with one, a theory that's one of my favorites. I think it is brilliant. It was useful. It made a ton of sense.

It just wasn't true. Details deep hit. Right. And that is the theory of the luminiferous ether. So to be our guide through the luminiferous ether we have with us today, David Kaiser. He's a professor of physics and history of science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. David, thank you so much for joining us. It's a great pleasure.

Thanks for having me. So I think I want to ask you first about this word, luminiferous. What does that mean? It's a great word, isn't it? It really just means light carrying. So luminous, like Lumos, for our Harry Potter fans, it means light. And Ferris is like a Ferris wheel, a ferry something. So it's the light carrying or light-bearing ether.

That's where the word came from. And does that tell us about what this theory was supposed to do to explain? I mean, where does the luminiferous ether come from? Yeah, it's a very descriptive term. So the idea, which goes back a little over 200 years, but now, early in the 18th, a number of naturalists, of physicists of many stripes, were trying to understand the nature of light. Isaac Newton, even before them, had had very specific ideas that light was a stream of particles, of corpuscles coursing through the air, and that account had some sort of cracks in it,

that people were less and less satisfied by the early 1800s, and what ultimately replaced it was a wave theory of light, that light was a wave phenomenon, and that would explain things like interference or diffraction or many, many, very particular phenomena that people could actually see, could produce with light waves. And so the new idea was that light was a wave, and that immediately raised the question, a wave of what? An ocean wave is a wave of water on the ocean. sound waves are disturbances in the air, traveling through the air. So if light is a wave, the sort of unavoidable next question that these people began to face in the early 1800s was it's a wave of what?

What medium is sort of bearing or ferrying that wave? And they figured there must be some new substance, some as yet unexpected material that must pervade all of the universe, fill every nook and cranny. And it must be the light-bearing or light-carrying substance, the luminiferous either. And how many people believed this? Like, was it everybody, most people? It was pretty much everybody, everybody who thought hard about optics, about the behavior of light. It wasn't just sort of one idea among many. It was once the wave theory of light really took hold, and that was pretty quick in the early 1800s, then it really seemed unavoidable to people thinking about the

behavior of light, that there must be some medium, some light-bearing medium that could account for all the really quite amazing things that people were learning about optics. So I think we have to talk about one guy in particular, and that is Albert Michelson, correct? So he was one of these people who was super invested in investigating

ether. Who was he, and where did he come from? He had a quite eventful early life, I understand. He really did. I mean, it's just an amazing story. Albert Michelson was born in a tiny little rural village in northern Europe, on the border of what would later become the border between Germany and Poland. And when he was only two years old, he and his

family moved to Northern California in the mid-1850s. This was the height of the gold rush. This was like the boom towns of the upper California, northern California. And so he moved there as a two-year-old. His father became a merchant. He set up a dry goods store in this very kind of minimal mining town. And they literally just tried to sort of scrape by. A few years later, the family moved to He was really, you know, this sort of displaced immigrant family that found themselves in the far western United States and not in any of the big cities, really, in some up-and-coming but kind of, you know, border-type areas. And tell us about how, you know, they believe the ether existed, but it was invisible, right? How are you going to measure it?

And that's what he set up an experiment to do. He did. He was a really brilliant experimenter. In fact, he made his name as someone who was especially good at coaxing these very subtle, very difficult to measure effects, especially around the behavior of light. So their best bet to learn about the ether was to study the stuff that the ether seemed to support, meaning light, to do very careful optical experiments. One of the first that Michelson did when he was actually still a student was to try to measure the speed of light to better accuracy than anyone had done before. He was building on an experimental design that others had thought of a few decades before, but he really went at it with real ingenuity.

He improved it so much that he started to get the attention even of the experts in Europe. And that was a big deal. This was a young person in the United States at a time when physics in the U.S. was still really not even on the kind of on the map for the great leaders in Europe. But this one kid, basically, began kind of getting attention for very careful, clever experiments around optics. He's like a measurement freak, like this is his thing, to like, how exact can I get it? That's right.

In fact, his measurement of the speed of light was within a few thousandths of a percent of the present, you know, modern day best value. He didn't have lasers or fancy electronics, and yet he got so, so close to our present value. And even what impressed his contemporaries was the precision of that measurement. The error bars that he could report were so, so minimal because he was indeed so gifted with these optical experiments. So explain what is the experiment that Michelson comes up with to try to detect the ether?

How does that work? He got a fellowship in 1880. So he was able to leave. He'd been studying at the Naval Academy, actually in Annapolis. And then he got a fellowship to study in some of these great centers in Europe to continue to learn about optics and the more modern theories about physics more generally. And while he was there, he was doing a lot of reading of the works by the great James Clark Maxwell, who had not too long before, only a decade or two earlier, had really pieced together

the sort of great synthesis of electricity, magnetism, and optics. And it was really Maxwell's work that convinced, you know, generations to come. The light was nothing other than waves of electric and magnetic fields propagating, moving through this light-bearing ether. So Michelson was reading all that he could from people like Maxwell, and he began to realize, Michelson did, that if the ether is everywhere, and if we're on the earth, the earth is not sitting still, the earth moves around the sun, the sun seems to have local motions with respect to the galaxy, we're moving through the ether.

And so Michelson began to wonder, could we measure our own motion, could we measure the earth's motion through this all-pervasive, mysterious medium of the ether? and he reasoned sort of as follows. He said if you're standing outside on a still day, then you don't feel any particular breeze on your face. But once you get on a bicycle and start peddling really quickly, you'll feel a wind on your face because you're moving through the medium. In that case, the medium would be the air.

And so he said the same thing must be happening as the earth whizzes through this medium of the ether. And if so, could we try to measure its effects on how light would behave? In other words, can we measure the ether wind on our, face. Exactly. Can we measure the impact of the ether as made manifest, as made clear because we're moving through the ether? So basically study optics

here on Earth really carefully with great precision, and we should be able to measure the effect of the ether because we're moving through it. And so that experiment was a tremendous success, right? It was. I mean, he first dreamed it up in 1881. He actually got

some funding for it from Alexander Graham Bell. This guy was really, you know, the rise. He first built a small kind of prototype where the device was about one meter, you know, roughly three feet on each side. So not huge, manageable to see if he could get the ideas literally to fit together. And he conducted the test with this sort of small-scale device, did not find any particular evidence for our motion through the ether. But he figured that's because it's a small device and he can keep going. A few years later, he tried a much more ambitious version with a colleague named Edward Morley. So it became known as a

Michelson Morley experiment. They were now working in Cleveland at what's now Case Western University. And so they built a device where the arms were 11 meters long. This really filled a room. You know, think of the ambition. They had to shield against any kind of vibrations. So they set this thing in a huge vat of mercury, which I don't recommend for those trying this at home today. But they really wanted to tamp down any vibrations from, you know, from the outside or anything like that. And David, just to give people an idea, like this instrument that they're building, I mean, we still use this kind of instrument today for stuff.

For all over the place. That's right. The instrument has outlived its original motivation many, many times over. And it's central to many areas of science and technology. The LIGO project used it to detect gravity waves. It's at the heart of LIGO. It's used for all kinds of industrial calibrations. It's used throughout many, many fields of science. It's an amazing tool that now we sort of take for granted. But it really was a great, great advance when Michelson was sort of following this dream back in the 1800s. So he built this giant version of the original experiment, gets it going, and that's a huge success too, right? Well, it depends on how he measured success. I should say, Michelson continued to impress the real elite

scientists in Europe. He was the first physicist based in the United States to win the Nobel prize when those began to be offered around 1900. So she had a lot of the world. not finding something? For doing sort of highly precise optical experiments. And not finding something then as now, the very smart people could say, well, maybe there's something about how the instrument behaves that's more subtle than we thought. Maybe the thing we're trying to measure has more subtle properties than we thought. So that's, you know, it spurred much, much more research.

But he didn't find the ether, is what you're saying. He did not. In fact, I should say he lived till 1931. So that's 50 years after he built his first device. And to his dying day, he considered himself something of a failure. May all our Nobel laureates be easier on themselves and the rest of us, too. So he won the great prestige in the profession, but was convinced really literally decades later that the ether must be there, and it was his darn fault for not finding it.

So it finally killed the idea of the luminiferous ether. And the popular story goes that Einstein used this experiment as his experiment. launching pad and kills the idea? Is that how it happened? The short answer is no. And so whether Einstein even knew about this experiment is still really pretty hotly debated among the experts. If he knew about it, it would have been most likely second or third hand, reading about other people's accounts of it. He was certainly not kind of obsessing over it, although many of his colleagues in Europe were at the time. And so Einstein was coming at the question of how light should behave or how we should measure the effects of light when either

the sender or the receiver are in motion with respect to each other, he was following a very different line of thinking than pretty much everyone else on the topic. So Einstein was not driven to relativity because of this experiment. And in fact, most people didn't sort of buy relativity right away. So the ether lived a lot longer even after the introduction of special relativity, really for at least a solid decade to decade and a half. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Ira Flato here. with Annie Minnoff, co-host of our Undiscovered podcast, working on a new history of science ideas,

talking about the ether, first with David Kaiser, Professor of Physics, and of History of Science at MIT in Cambridge. I mean, so, David, is this a tragic story for you? You have Michelson, poor guy, working his whole career to try to measure this stuff that he's convinced is there, and he just thinks he's a failure

because he can't, you know, design the instrument that's going to be fine enough to detect it? That seems to me like a pretty sad story. You know, I think on the individual level, I think it does have some sadness. Now, again, let's be clear. He had a brilliant career. Surely that cushioned the blow.

That's right. He did okay. The local boy did good. But nonetheless, he considered himself scientifically that he'd never really achieved what he set out to. And that is, there's an element of real sadness to that. On the other hand, the instrument has outlived its original motivation, you know, manyfold.

he was able to do other things even in his own lifetime with that instrument that really did trigger enormous progress. He used this instrument to be the first person to measure the diameter of a distant star. That's pretty amazing. He also was able to measure effects in atomic physics that really helped jumpstart quantum theory. I mean, there were many things that he could, even in his own lifetime, could point to with real pride, even though he died thinking there must be an ether and he failed to find it. So did the ether do us any good, or would we have been better? never to have conceived of this idea? You know, I think it did us worlds of good.

I mean, I always joke that our students here at MIT in many places can still buy T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on them. I love those T-shirts. Maxwell derived the laws that we still use, the governing laws for electricity and magnetism and therefore all of optics and everything else, because he was trying to understand the physics of the ether. His colleague, Lord Kelvin, said in the 1880s,

the luminiferous ether is the only substance we are confident of in dynamics. The only substance, one thing we are sure of is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether. It drove these people's work, and we still use their equations. We use their work in many ways as a guide really to this day. Is there any modern, day equivalent of the ether? Well, that's a good question. You know, Einstein himself toyed somewhat tongue-in-cheek later in his career, wondering if his own later work in relativity had sort of reincheriorated.

something like an ether, his work on the general theory of relativity, the warping space time. Maybe it wasn't a material substance like a bowl of jelly, but maybe there's some other substance that we should think of. And then more, you know, in modern days, we think about the Higgs boson, pervading all of space, giving rise to observable properties. I mean, I think there are many ideas we can see with some analogies, at least. David Kaiser, Professor Physics at the History of Science at MIT and Cambridge. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you. It was great fun. Annie Minnup, co-hosts have Uniscovered podcasts whose hard at work on a new series all about failed ideas of science history. Thank you, Annie. We look forward to this. Thank you. And one last thing before we go, 100 years ago this week,

Sir Arthur Eddington made his famous measurement of starlight, light bent by the gravitational mass of the sun. His measurements proved Einstein's general relativity theory and his predictions were correct and made Einstein an overnight sensation. We have a special history of that moment experiment in the Science Friday podcast feed this week, and we often release special extras in there. So if you only hear us on the radio, you're missing stuff.

Check out the podcast feed, too, because every day is Science Friday. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music, and of course, as I say, you can listen to our podcasts on our website or wherever you get your podcast, and certainly the special one this week about the 100-year anniversary of the Eddington famous viewing of the Starlight. And if you missed any part of our program, go to our website. You have smart speakers. You can ask them to play Science Friday whenever you want. Every day now, as I say, is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.